Published January 29, 2024

We present this curriculum not as “turn-key,” but as a possible starting point for educators who wish to develop teaching materials for helping their students to understand and use healthy relationship skills with their peers, families, neighbors, teachers and others.

Advantages to using this curriculum as a starting point include:

• FREE access to these and other lessons – just create one free account
• Standards Alignment: CASEL 5 and National Health Education Standards
• Course Pre- and Post-Survey
• Student Worksheets to print or use in the EverFi online platform

NCESD Recommendations:

• Identify and address all of the Prior Learning that your students would need in order to benefit from the five lessons. For example:
  • Do your students understand the difference between thoughts and feelings?
  • Do your students understand what values are?
  • Would your students know what is meant by managing emotions?
• Expand any parts of the lessons for which your students could benefit from spending more time interacting with the information in more detail. For example:
  • Would your students be likely to retain the information from Slide 5 of Lesson 1, the diagram and written explanation of the five regions of the brain, without an expansion activity?
  • Consider having your students use colored pencils to draw and color the brain image on large paper, with arrows going to more drawings, of the students’ own design, to show the functions of the brain regions.
  • Drawings of eyes, noses and ears could be connected by arrows to the thalamus, which would be connected by more arrows to each of the other regions of the brain.
• Determine how you will treat each topic.
  • Slide 6 of Lesson 1 for example, raises the topic of Social Identities, including social class and socioeconomic status.
  • Are these concepts appropriate for your students in grades 6, 7, 8 & 9?
  • Could they be understood and discussed respectfully among your students?
  • Would it be better to eliminate any of the content?
• Instead of asking students to raise their hands if they have a sense of belonging, could you ask them to think about the question without responding in a public manner?
• Adjust the time allowance (currently one hour per each of five lessons) to your modifications for your students.

We hope this resource will help you develop a unit of instruction in healthy relationship skills that you will enjoy teaching and your students will engage in eagerly!

Please note that EverFi slides are PDF documents, and without special software, are not editable.

To create a FREE account and access this resource, as well as other curricula, visit EverFi.